This short was nominated for the Academy Award for Documentary Short. There will be spoilers ahead:
This short focuses on the campaign to eradicate polio, covering specifically the campaign by the government to have every child under five vaccinated with the Sabin vaccine. It's no small task, with millions of workers spreading out across India-the vast majority of them volunteers.
Interspersed between interviews with workers and officials in India are interviews with survivors of polio epidemics in the US. It wasn't really that long ago that polio was still a possibility in the US. All of this serves to point up a very stark reality, namely that polio isn't eradicated until it's totally gone, because someone with the virus could end up halfway around the world in a day or two.
Polio in India is essentially confined to a couple of states, but a lot of the most susceptible are poor migratory workers and it wouldn't take much to spread the disease. The sheer numbers are staggering. On a day set up to conduct a mass vaccination at booths and tents, officials expected to vaccinate something on the order of 197,000,000 children, or a number better than half the size of the current US population-and this was back in 2006 or 2007 (the documentary was released in 2009).
This short is available on DVD and is well worth seeking out. Most highly recommended.
This short focuses on the campaign to eradicate polio, covering specifically the campaign by the government to have every child under five vaccinated with the Sabin vaccine. It's no small task, with millions of workers spreading out across India-the vast majority of them volunteers.
Interspersed between interviews with workers and officials in India are interviews with survivors of polio epidemics in the US. It wasn't really that long ago that polio was still a possibility in the US. All of this serves to point up a very stark reality, namely that polio isn't eradicated until it's totally gone, because someone with the virus could end up halfway around the world in a day or two.
Polio in India is essentially confined to a couple of states, but a lot of the most susceptible are poor migratory workers and it wouldn't take much to spread the disease. The sheer numbers are staggering. On a day set up to conduct a mass vaccination at booths and tents, officials expected to vaccinate something on the order of 197,000,000 children, or a number better than half the size of the current US population-and this was back in 2006 or 2007 (the documentary was released in 2009).
This short is available on DVD and is well worth seeking out. Most highly recommended.
